A Research On The Application Of Mind Mapping Through Teaching Life Sciences In A Junior High School

Since teaching is the central task of the school, classroom teaching is the main channel to explore potential and cultivate intelligence so as to implement quality educationZhihong Wu.2003.3:12-3). What's more. classroom teaching, which should be involved with fruitful activities, requires a high-quality delivery of information to improve teaching effectiveness. For this reason, to choose teaching strategies is the dominant factor to enhance teaching effectiveness. Therefore, the author aims at the research on the application of Mind Mapping through teaching life sciences in a junior high school. As a kind of arranged thinking tool. Mind Mapping, which is a type of divergent thinking using colors, images and symbols to help students enhance their memory and creativity, makes learning and memorizing more fun, individual and diverse. As a matter of fact. there are a lot of cases and researches applying Mind Mapping abroad. In this paper, the author applies Mind Mapping through teaching life sciences in a junior high school and tries to find effective ways to improve her teaching.Adopting research methods such as document searching, questionnaire issuing, case study and experiment analysis, the author hopes to obtain suitable strategies for skills of making Mind Mapping as well as suitable strategies for giving new. revision and exercise lessons based on subject features, teaching contents and different students'levels. Taught by the author, graduates of 2007 from two classes of Year Eight, were chosen to be studied. However, the author devoted herself to Mind Mapping teaching in Class Two, which was the experimental class, while Class Three served as a compared class. Before the experiment. both the experimental class and the compared class were tested for their original academic performance and creativity and so were they a year later. With the help of SPSS software, the following conclusions could be drawn. First, Mind Mapping teaching strategy could really improve students'levels of academic performance in life sciences. Second, three main factors of creativity were significantly increased in the experimental class, and among which the improvement of flexibility thinking is the most significant.Through document searching, the author has found there were few detailed documents concerning biology teaching using mind maps, especially life sciences teaching in junior high schools. Therefore, the author hopes that her study can provide a reference to improve teaching effectiveness for junior life sciences. Due to the limit in terms of time and number of students involved in this study. inadequacy and deficiency are hard to avoid and therefore further research and experiment are necessary for research findings so far to be reliable.